As far as holiday placement goes, we’ve decided it can’t possibly be an accident that New Year’s Day is located so closely to Christmas. How else could people all over the world get pumped up about starting the yearly routine all over again than after a healthy dose of good holiday fun and frivolity — and extra time off from work?

So since we’re still hopped up on holiday cheer, we can look back at 2011 with fondness and approach 2012 with optimism.

As is the yearly custom for most newspaper folks, we took the opportunity as we change calendars to look back at some of the larger news events of the past year. Though a lot of papers do, we did not rank the events in any way. How do you decide one tragedy or one city council decision is bigger than another? We found it much easier to just present them as a whole — with no ranking system.

We culled through our print editions of the last year and found the 11 stories — for 2011, get it? — that stood above the rest, either in terms of impact, significance or public reaction. We don’t know if we’ll stick with this trend — 12 for 2012, 13 for 2013 and so on. Something tells us the editor in the year 2082 might be a little peeved if anything gets set in stone along these lines, so we’ll play it by ear. For this year we have 11 stories, which in relation to our output this year is not a lot.

We average about four local stories a day, which comes out to roughly 1,248 stories over a given year — an estimate we consider to be rather conservative. So obviously, some big stories were left out. We had school millage elections, important quorum court and city council decisions, a missing soldier, a tragic hit and run, nearly every variety of severe weather — so many stories there was no way to include them all without stepping into the 2082 editor’s territory.

We hope the stories we’ve chosen will resonate with our readers as the especially important stories of the year. If not, feel free to let us know about it on our website, Facebook page or through a good old fashioned letter to the editor.

In 2011, we hope we did our job of keeping the public informed on all varieties of news. Plenty of our news stories from the past year — some which were mentioned in our “11 of 2011”, some not — are based on changes that will take effect in the coming year. This is where the optimism comes in. As the new year begins, some buildings near completion and planning for new roads, new schools, new libraries, new stores and other facilities and services continues. Russellville School District will wrap up a major piece of construction, just in time for Dardanelle to begin a new primary building and renovation of its high school. 2012 will provide the completion of many of these types of projects, and more will enter the planning stages, awaiting completion in 2013 or further down the line, and we hope to be there to report on them.

Naturally, the type of events that no planning can alter will happen as well, and we’ll bring you news of those as they occur, too.

Thank you for choosing us as your source for news, both online and with our print edition, in 2011 — and we hope to hold that position through 2012 and beyond.